Web Content Strategy and UX: Weekly Digest, 27 Mar 2011

Our digest this week will be a bit shorter than usual because we’re jet lagged after literally flying half way around the world a few days ago. There’s also been slightly slimmer pickings on the Content Strategy and UX fronts this week, which we are attributing to the post-SXSW hangover many of you are probably still suffering from.

Content Strategy

Typographer extraordinaire Mark Boulton is publishing a Content Strategy book as part of his Five Simple Steps book series. In A Richer Canvas Boulton talks about how design needs to happen “from the content out, rather than from the canvas in.” Amen my brother! (Full disclosure, Contentini’s Dan has a Five Simple Steps title coming out later in the year called A Practical Guide to Web App Success).

User Experience

The User Experience and the Psychology of Colour tests common beliefs we hold about what colors mean to users. The results aren’t really surprising – green is associated with success and red with failure – but the post underscores the importance of considering conventions and consistency when making color choices, particularly in an interface environment. It’s important to note that this is a Western-centric post, and that the results don’t necessarily hold true across cultures: check out the graph on Yahoo! Finance China, for example, to see how the roles of red and green are reversed.

I was kind of reluctant to link to How to Ruin Good User Experience in 20 Simple Steps because I find the design of this site really painful. Google Adverts under your title? So 2009! But once I got past all the stuff competing for my attention, I found this to be a pretty decent read with a load of practical examples of unnecessary functionality that truly can ruin a user’s experience.

Shameless plug: make sure to check out our near real-time Twitter trends tool for more on what people are sharing in the disciplines of Content Strategy, User Experience, Web Strategy and SEO Strategy.